MULTI CRITERIA DECISION MAKING BASED ON DEMATEL AND ANP TECHNIQUES TO SELECT THE OPTIMUM LOCATION FOR CEMETERIES, ISFAHAN CITY, IRAN

Introduction: One of the major tasks of urban and regional planners is allocation of land to various urban utilizations according to the role and function of the city, urban economy, and also cross-effect of the land-uses with each other. This is the quantitative aspect of the subject, but what is more important is the qualitative aspect which means appropriate distribution and deployment of land-uses or applications on a physical level (optimal location of land-use). A planning in this way by appropriate land-uses help citizens enjoy the services and facilities offered in different parts of the city. This competent planning requires no additional commuting and will reduce environmental pollution, help to create safe urban space and acceptable environment, and provides peaceful, convenient living. Cemeteries are the places where are considered as the essential services in urban areas. Unfortunately, it is predicted that fullness and replenishment of cemeteries will leads to urban crisis in the next decade and finding other places for cemeteries will be unavoidable. Necessity of having the second or third cemetery in urban areas is not only because of their replenishment or fullness but also it is due to their distance from the cities. This can be problematic for the citizens and make difficulties for the citizens to visit the graves. It seems that the idea of cemeteries development in different directions of the cities would makes the access to them easier for the citizens. Nevertheless, urban planners still do not pay attention to establishment of new cemeteries in the cities according to the facts. Due to the importance finding a suitable place for construction of cemetery in one hand and the complexity of the problem because of different effective factors on the other hand, selection of a suitable environment to model and solve the problem is very important to find the solution. According to studies and surveys conducted in Geographical Information System (GIS) it was found that this system has excellent features and capabilities in collection, storage, retrieval, detection, integration, analysis, modeling, and displaying of geographic data. Having these functionalities, GIS can be used in site selection of urban centers such as cemeteries by involvement of qualitative and quantitative variables. Moreover, GIS can also be used as a strong decision support system in urban planning and management. Therefore, to model and solve the optimization problem of finding a suitable place for a cemetery, the techniques in the MCDM is utilized in GIS environment. Materials: In this study, environmental, social, and economic standards have been considered for finding a suitable place for constructing a new cemetery. Effective criteria in locating the cemetery were identified using expert opinions and resources. Included criteria are distance from city, distance from river, access to main road, slope, geology, soil, and land-use. After the criteria were identified, due to the lack of sufficient information about the amount of effectiveness and interaction of the factors with each other it was tried to make a weighting of the factors based on their relationships. Distance from city: there are different reasons that the cemetery should be located away from the urban main structure. From the jurisprudential view, the maximum distance of cemetery from the city shall be such that not to break the prayer and revocation of fasting. On the other hand, given that the Muslims are going to pilgrimage of the graves periodically (roughly every week), thus distance of cemetery should not be such that the citizens have access difficulties. It should not also cause transmission in many types of contaminations. However, for the favour of urbanism principles, distance between cemetery and the city is necessary, otherwise several problems such as the following will occurs: Transmission of different types of pollutions including air pollutions due to burning of the dead costumes, interactions resulting from decomposition of corpses, contamination caused by burial in soil, noise pollution induced mourning and wailing voices of the survivors. Psychological effects and depression of people, particularly for children who living around the cemetery, they are facing harrowing scenes of wailing every day. Traffic due to mass movement of the participants in funeral ceremony. Road access criteria: due to funeral ceremony and the events afterwards, commuting to the cemetery takes place in collective and group form. At specific days such as Friday nights and some national religious occasions many people turn to the cemeteries. Therefore, proper and safe access to these Ar ch ive of S ID